Students tend to think that everything they read is important.

But - the problem with trying to remember EVERYTHING you read is that you actually end up remembering very little. Our brains can only retain so much information before it goes into overdrive, so its critical to help little brains, aka our students, develop strategies to strain out the nonessential information from the books that they read.

How do we do this?  It should come as no surprise when I say that we need to explicitly teach them how. We need to show students how to separate out the important, must-remember information from the interesting, but not essential details in a text.

Teaching students to determine importance will help set the foundation for students to be able to master other critical reading comprehension strategies like inferring and synthesizing that they will need to pull out from their reading toolbox as well.  

In order to infer, students need to be able to pick up on the important details that serve as clues in making inferences.  They need to determine importance first.

Synthesizing requires students to collect all the important details from and textual “bread crumbs” left throughout a book in order to come to a much deeper and complete understanding of the story.  It starts with determining importance.

For complete show notes, visit:  classroomnook.com/podcast/59

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LINKS & RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE
EPISODE 54: 6 GREAT Reading Activities to Use With Nearly ANY Novel!
Reading Comprehension Strategies: 

• EPISODE 41: Teaching Reading Comprehension Strategies
• EPISODE 42: Reading Comprehension Instruction: How to Teach Making Connections
• EPISODE 47: Reading Comprehension Strategies: How to Teach Visualizing
• EPISODE 51: Reading Comprehension Strategies: How to Teach Making Predictions

Favorite Books to use for modeling Determining Importance (affiliate links):

• The Important Book by:  Margaret Wise Brown (this is a great book to introduce the reading strategy)
• Love Will See You Through by Angela Farris Watkins
• The Stray Dog by Marc Simont 
• Grandfather’s Journey by Allen Say

Grab my FREE Determining Importance Bookmark inside the Members Resource Library under “Reading Resources.”